Post-processing: yay or nay?
There’s a lot of controversy surrounding the touching up of photographs, particularly digital photographs. A lot of photographers and even photography enthusiasts will argue that touching up the photo takes away its originality and uniqueness, that touching up a photograph is similar to air-brushing a model prior to publishing her photos in a magazine.
I respectfully disagree. To me, the touching up that is done during post-processing is more about improving the colors and vibrancy of the photographs, and less about changing the content of them. Actually, that’s the big thing: adjusting colors, upping the exposure, turning down the shadows and increasing overall contrast doesn’t change the content of a photograph! Imagine a picture of a tree. The tree is a fully blooming Japanese cherry tree, and the detail picked up by the camera of its blooms is absolutely amazing. Now imagine that photograph being presented to you in full color, and again in black and white. Aside from the obvious lack of color in the second photo, is there any difference between the two? Has the tree itself been somehow altered? No, of course not.
For the record, I do some post-processing on all of my photos. In most cases I do nothing more but up the contrast so that the colors pop, but I may also play with shadows and overall exposure. And just as using a brighter light bulb in your living room does not change the look of your furniture (aside from lightening it up), brightening your photographs or improving their color saturation does not change the content that you photographed.
Filed Under: Digital Photography